Half Metaphor
by TheIslander
Summary: There is a reason why she is the girl of his dreams and not his reality. Gray/Lucy one shot.


**A/N:** If you're a big Gray/Lucy dork like I am, chances are you probably know about that infamous Gemini-as-Gray moment in Chapter 143 (or Episode 58 in the anime). The moment made me squee in a bittersweet kind of way because I thought the writers were just being cruel, dropping a moment like that on us when they are clearly gearing more towards Natsu/Lucy (while we don't know for sure that they'll definitely get together, there's a higher probability of it than G/L). While I sincerely heart N/L fans, I couldn't help feeling sorry for Gray and was inspired to write a story about the doomed reality of his crush.

Having not written much for the better part of six years, this took a really long time to finish and I got stuck in many places. At one point, my muse struck elsewhere and so I took a break and wrote what eventually became "Your Princess Is In Another Castle", which is actually kind of an extension of this story. So if it sounds familiar in certain places, it's because both stories have the some roots.

Alrighty, enough babbling. I sincerely appreciate any and all reviews, especially constructive criticism. Happy reading!

**HALF METAPHOR**

"_Call me morbid, call me pale_

_I've spent too long on your tail_

_Far too long chasing your tail_

_And if you have five seconds to spare_

_Then I'll tell you the story of my life."_

The Smiths, "Half A Person"

* * *

Gray has never told anyone, but sometimes he still has nightmares about Deliora.

In these nightmares, he feels the searing heat of demonic fire as it ravages Isvan, the townspeople's screams ringing in his ears, heightened desperation clogging the air as the only home he has ever known crumbles violently around him. His mother extends a trembling hand, only to transform into Ur who tells him to be brave and run and never look back. And so he does, only to look back anyway like a tiny, wild-eyed Orpheus, horror snaking through his gut as he watches Deliora and Ur converge to form an unholy, towering sculpture.

He always wakes up at this part, sweat beading on skin that is colder than he can ever remember it being.

He doesn't brood too much over these dreams, though. The years have taught him patience and vigilance, and if there is one thing Gray knows about life, it is this: closure doesn't mean certain ghosts won't linger with you all your life. That's just the way of things.

No, it's the _other_ dreams he's been having lately that make him uneasy because he doesn't know what they mean.

In these dreams, a ridiculously well-endowed blond _goddess_ – that is the only word he can use to describe her – hovers in the distance, shrouded in a haze of starlight. Her tawny eyes are gentle as they rest on his, but he has a feeling that she could break him into pieces if she wants to. Her lips curve upwards into a pure smile before she turns and glides away. A tender chorus of tinkles accompanies her movements.

He can't stop watching her even if he tries.

"Wait," he finds himself blurting out. She pauses long enough to grace him with another smile, more amused this time.

"_Did you think you would win_?" she asks teasingly. Her voice resonates in his ear like the echo of a hymn. Gray opens his mouth to answer – never mind that he has no clue what she's talking about – when suddenly she is much closer to him than she was a few moments ago, and she lifts one slender hand to touch his temple.

Everything changes.

Gray's eyes fall shut as he takes it all in, absorbs what she proffers to him. Behind his eyelids he sees tangles of constellations, the never ending lines of light that bind the universe for eternity, the otherworldly melodies that keep the celestial peace. A slight tingle runs through him; an infinitesimal hint of the immense power she wields over everything he has just seen.

He always wakes up at this part, eyes wide and sweat beading his skin. But his body is warmer that it has been in a long time, bones humming desperately for something he can't put a name to.

Sleep returns in uneasy fits on nights like these.

* * *

Gray stumbles wearily into the guild after one such night, hoping that some breakfast in his belly will make up for lack of sleep. He has barely settled down at a table with a plate of food when the front doors to the guild burst open and something resembling a loud pink tornado breezes through.

"Hey, porn star! We've been looking all over for you!"

Gray's eye twitches. It's really too early in the morning for this. He is about to retort when the cause of said eye twitching eagerly plunks down a sheet of paper.

"Take a look at this. A rich ass merchant wants someone to design a 20-foot igloo and a fire eater for his son's birthday party. _And _he's offered to pay 1,000,000 jewels!" Natsu crows eagerly. "This should cover Lucy's rent for a few more months!" he adds, jerking his thumb at Lucy, who is standing behind him and smiling sheepishly.

It sounds like a sweet deal, but so does sleep. Anyway, Gray doesn't even want to begin to imagine how much energy it would take to construct a 20-foot igloo – much less one that's guaranteed to be annihilated minutes later if Natsu's going to be in close proximity.

"Can't you ask someone else to go with you?" Gray grouses.

"Nobody else around here can make a giant _igloo_!" Natsu huffs impatiently as though he's a retard. "Anyway, we already got hold of the merchant and told him we'd take the job."

Gray's eye twitches again. "Well, why is Lucy coming along?"

"Oh…Makarov decided that this mission needed a supervisor," Lucy explains. Behind Natsu's back, she makes eye contact with Gray while gesturing discreetly at Natsu and then at herself. Gray raises an eyebrow in understanding, mentally translates 'supervisor' to 'damage control' and nods to himself. It makes sense.

"Well guys, what are we waiting for? Let's go!" And with that, Natsu is already sprinting enthusiastically for the door.

"Wait a minute, you overflamed idiot! I never said I'd go!" Gray barks at the cloud of dust left in the dragon slayer's wake.

Lucy shrugs and gives him a sympathetic pat on his shoulder. For some reason, a sudden warmth spreads through his body. "Meet you outside in ten minutes?"

Gray looks at her pleadingly. "Do I have to?" he whines.

She's already starting to walk out but turns back and gives him an amused smile. "It's Natsu, Gray. Did you think you would win?"

_"Did you think you would win?" she asks teasingly._

An epiphanic grenade goes off in his head.

He's wide awake now.

Gray spends the rest of the day obsessing over his 20-foot igloo and studiously avoiding Lucy. This still doesn't explain why he sees her face smiling back at him from the surface of every damn ice brick. Or why he keeps imagining the tinkling of her keys behind his back.

He's screwed.

* * *

He tells himself that it's just a crush, just his body talking. After all, he's a healthy male teenager – isn't it considered normal for the women in your life to occasionally pop into your dreams in less-than-compromising circumstances?

_Well, you don't find yourself dreaming of Erza or Cana, do you? Or Juvia_, a voice in his head counters mischievously.

Gray chokes a little at that last part.

"Everything alright, Gray? You look a bit green," Mirajane observes as she places his drink on the counter.

"S'nothing," he mumbles convincingly, taking a hasty swig from his glass.

Mirajane raises an eyebrow but doesn't press the matter further. Instead, she spends the next hour watching Gray alternate between staring moodily at the counter and absentmindedly making shapes out of the ice cubes in his drink from the corner of her eye. When he finally leaves, she peers curiously at the melting cubes. They are all in the shape of tiny keys.

She smiles knowingly to herself.

He decides that his strategy will be to play things cool. How hard can it be? He knows he's attractive, he's charming when he wants to be, and he's made more than one girl swoon just by opening his mouth to speak. But Lucy Heartfilia seems to be made of a different mold – despite her openness to others and despite their solid friendship, he senses a sort of wall beyond that point that he has yet to figure out how to scale.

So he starts small. He makes offhanded compliments whenever he thinks he can get away with it: "Cut your hair again? It suits you" or "That new top does make you look cute". It's supremely clichéd, but he's willing to make the sacrifice just to see Lucy's pleased smile directed at him for once instead of that stupid pink fireball.

One time she's in an extremely good mood after he compliments a pretty new blouse she is wearing (It's tight, lacy and low cut, what's not to like? Of course, out loud he only tells her it is "becoming") when she leans towards him unexpectedly. The sudden close proximity causes goosebumps to break out on his arm. He has a vague recollection of his dream when she parts her soft lips and says good-naturedly, "Now, how about _you _put on some clothes, hmm?"

_Damnit_. He'd been so careful to dress nicely for the occasion too.

* * *

One day, he walks into the guild to see a visibly upset Juvia being consoled by Mirajane at the bar. When she sees him enter, red-rimmed eyes widen and she quickly leaves. When he asks Mirajane what happened to her, the bartender simply shakes her head resignedly and goes back to work.

This little incident goes forgotten until the next time Juvia literally bumps into him, apologizes and scuttles off hurriedly again. It is not until sometime later that he realizes she dropped the '-sama' from his name when addressing him.

* * *

You can describe Gray Fullbuster in a lot of ways, but stupid isn't one of them.

He knows there's something he isn't doing right. All the stops he's been pulling out – subtle flirting, 'accidental' physical contact, lingering gazes – don't seem to have left the slightest impact on Lucy. Sure, she smiles and blushes at all the right times but nothing beyond that. He's beginning to suspect they're nothing more than instinctual reactions.

If he's going to be honest with himself, he knows exactly what – _who_, his inner voice cuts in snidely – the problem is.

But he's not going to go there right now. He's going for the win, after all.

For the girl in his dreams.

* * *

"Look, I said I was sorry. It was just lying there on your table out in the open. I couldn't resist!"

"Don't the words 'PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL' mean anything to you? You can't just go around reading people's diaries like they're menus!"

"It's not reading if I was just skimming the pages!"

"How can you skim the pages without reading?"

Gray barely bats an eye as his two comrades continue to bicker over the top of his head. A small crowd has gathered off to the side, watching the argument unfold with interest; somewhere in the background, Macau calls for more popcorn. Times like these, Gray would normally tell Lucy and Natsu to shut the hell up before pointing out the undisputable facts at hand: that Natsu is an idiot who can't be expected to keep his hands to himself when it comes to trespassing on other people's property; and that Lucy shouldn't have been careless and left her diary on vulnerable ground.

Today, however, he doesn't do any of this. He's decided his hot meal is worth paying more attention to than any half-baked arguments these two always seem to get into. Also, he's kind of pissed that Natsu got to peek into Lucy's diary before he did.

A couple of hours later when they have set off on a mission – Lucy and Erza walking out of earshot a good ten feet ahead of the guys, Lucy still in a huff – Gray makes his move.

"So, Lucy's diary, huh? Anything interesting?" he asks with just the right amount of nonchalance.

Natsu glances furtively at the blonde figure in the distance. "Yeah, did you know she owns 72 pairs of shoes?"

Gray rolls his eyes; it figures that the dragon slayer would give him nothing to work with. "You call that interesting, hothead?"

"Call me that again!" Natsu growls and raises his fist. However, he has the sense to lower it and look innocent when Erza looks back at them with a deadly gleam in her eyes. "At least," he adds, lowering his voice, "she called _me_ fine-limbed and sexy!"

"_What_?"

"Oh yes she did, and a whole bunch of other stuff!" Natsu confirms, the corners of his lips curving upwards in a smirk. "She told me she writes down notes like this about everyone she meets to help inspire her stories, which kinda makes sense, right? She called Erza…well, something about bloodlike hair and being a really awesome fighter. Seriously poetic."

"Oh yeah? What'd she say about me?" _Stay cool, Gray. Keep that face straight, Gray._

"Eh…" Natsu's face scrunches up in his effort to remember. "I think she said you had really cool magic…wait, I know there was something else too…"

Despite his best efforts, Gray can't help it. A treacherous sliver of hope wells up from within his chest.

"Oh, now I remember. She said you were a really good friend," Natsu recalls triumphantly. He glances again at Lucy and a fond expression crosses his face. "Y'know, I don't get why she's so mad about me reading her diary. She says the nicest things about us."

"The nicest things," Gray agrees, and looks away.

* * *

After that, it's impossible to pretend not to discern how much closer Natsu and Lucy are becoming the way he used to, especially when they're all always going on missions together. Lucy and Natsu gravitate subconsciously toward each other, and Gray gets the feeling he's the only one among the three who really notices. Whenever he's around them, he feels like a looming glacier that they swerve to avoid; in his case, the glacier part is only half metaphor.

He can't wrap his head around the situation no matter how hard he tries, and trust him, he tries _hard_. He observes, analyzes, ponders, summarizes but still can't come to any conclusive answer. Why Natsu? Why the boy who already gets more glory than him in battle, who's so dense when it comes to romance he wouldn't recognize it if it hit him like a ton of bricks?

"Why just the two of them, gramps?" he not-so-subtly asks Makarov one day after the old master assigns Lucy and Natsu to take what is a relatively simple C-rank mission, in his opinion.

"Less chance of me getting another property damage summon," Makarov replies wearily. "Though that boy can even turn cleaning up a playground into a war zone…" Gray snorts in agreement, but stops hastily when Makarov shoots him a look that clearly implies, _Like you haven't done the same?_

The old man sighs. "All the more reason to send Lucy along with him. Young love tempers all other ills," he adds sagely as he shuffles off.

Gray's legs start to move before his brain processes the action. He needs to get out of here pronto because he needs to clear his head, and he sure as hell can't do that when he can feel Mirajane's pitying stare boring into his back.

That night in his dreams, he asks her why the hell she keeps coming to him when he is so clearly not what she wants. She just laughs in that infuriatingly precious way, and he wakes up trembling and discontented.

* * *

The day the news leaks, Gray is at the guild playing a round of cards with Cana. Cana has just taken the courtesy of pointing out his shirtless state _again_, so at first he's too busy looking around for his discarded shirt to notice Happy swooping excitedly into the room.

"They did it! They did it! He finally confessed!" Happy does a little dance on their table.

Cana raises her eyebrows. "Who confessed to what?"

"Natsu! He finally told Lucy how he feels about her! This is almost better than fish!" Happy is so giddy with exhilaration that he nearly plummets off the table. Whoops and cheers of "All right!" break out within the room upon hearing this.

Gray accidentally freezes the cards in his hands.

Shortly after, Natsu and Lucy walk past the front doors hand in hand. They are both blushing slightly, but Natsu has a ridiculously large smile on his face and Lucy looks happier than she ever has before.

A fresh wave of hooting and cheering washes over the room. Levy sprints forward and envelops her friend in a big hug. "Congratulations, Lu-chan! I knew you guys would get the ball rolling sooner or later!"

"Thanks, Levy," Lucy replies, embarrassed.

Macau and Wakaba give Natsu congratulatory pats on the back. "Well well well, our little Natsu's all grown up." Macau winks at him. "It's about time!"

As the other mages crowd eagerly around the new couple, a gentle hand lands on Gray's own shoulder. He looks up into the concerned eyes of the platinum-haired bartender. "Are you alright, Gray?" Mirajane asks very quietly.

She can't not know the answer to that, can she?

* * *

After that, he spends less time at the guild except for when a mission calls for it. Natsu and Lucy aren't exactly exhibitionists, but everyone can sense the honeymoon aura they exude from a mile away, and he doesn't really need that right now. He takes care not to make his feelings obvious, though. When asked about his increasingly frequent disappearances, he lies about having taken odd jobs or solo missions.

In reality, he takes to walking aimlessly around the further parts of town in the evenings, taking in nothing in particular. _Move on and seek out your future_, Ur once told him many years ago. Now here he is, a young man of eighteen who still can't get rid of his stripping habit or get the one girl he loves so desperately. Yes, he has made great strides indeed – pun intended.

It is during one of these walks that he encounters Juvia sitting on a bench overlooking a stone bridge. It suddenly occurs to him that he hasn't seen her much at the guild lately either. "Good evening, Gray," she greets without looking at him. He wonders how she does that.

"Hey, Juvia," he responds. She shifts slightly to make room for him on the bench, and he obliges. "What are you doing here all alone?"

"Oh, Juvia likes to come here to watch the sunset. It's quite far away from Fairy Hills, but Juvia thinks this place is very comfortable and serene," she explains. She tilts her head slightly to smile at him, and he finds himself wondering how he never noticed how richly the blue hues of her hair glint in the fading sunlight before.

"You come here every day to watch the sunset? Doesn't that get kind of…boring? Don't get me wrong, it's beautiful and all, but it always sets the same way."

Juvia taps her chin thoughtfully. "Well, yes and no. It looks the same but it's different from one day to the next. Juvia doesn't really know how to explain it. But she likes to imagine it's saying something like 'Goodnight, things have to be a bit darker before they get brighter, but I will be back'."

Gray mulls over this for a moment. "Hmm. I guess that's one way to look at it." He grins at her. "Funny, I wouldn't have pegged you as a sun fan, being a water mage and all."

Juvia acknowledges the irony with a wry smile. "Juvia supposes she is more than the sum of her parts."

They watch the sun set together in companionable silence.

* * *

For the first time in a long time, he doesn't dream of her that night.

* * *

The next day, Gray strolls into the guild to find Erza, Lucy and Natsu waiting for him like he'd never left. He's actually kind of pleased when the fire breather berates him for not being around when they needed him for missions, and he fights back with full fervour. Once they have traded their customary insults, Erza briefs them on the mission. She hasn't even finished before Natsu goes flying out the door, nearly bursting with anticipation. She shakes her head and follows suit with a slight smile. Which leaves him and Lucy exchanging amused looks.

"I'm glad you're coming with us on this one," she tells him earnestly. "Feels like we haven't been seeing much of you lately."

Gray just smiles back at her. "I've been around." _You just never noticed when it counted_.

Her shoulder brushes briefly against his as they head for the door together, and for a nanosecond his smile falters. But when they leave he walks easily with his hands in his pockets, smirk in place and comebacks at the ready. Because he is Gray Fullbuster, and he is nothing if not as cool as the ice he sculpts.

* * *

**P.S.:** And there you have it! Just to clarify, I was not aiming for Juvia/Gray. I knew I wanted to have her around in the story and she kind of ended up taking on a life of her own. The endgame was to have both characters parallel each other by realizing the futility of their feelings for the person they loved, and then bond with each other as kindred spirits and grow from there as friends. Or something like that. I hope the execution wasn't that cheesy.

**P.P.S.:** I'm not all doom and gloom, despite how mean I am to Gray, so you may expect a funny G/L fic from me somewhere in the future. :)


End file.
